I find it incredible that there is no proper way to recover your lost form input in Google Chrome. As many know, Textarea Cache on Firefox has much wider form support than Lazarus.
Lazarus has been very quirky from day one. Lazarus 3.0.6 is currently the official version in Chrome Web Store, but you might be able to also download 3.2 beta from http://getlazarus.com/download and then drag it to Chrome Extensions ( chrome://extensions/ ). However, 3.2 doesn't seem to work any better than 3.0.6 so maybe only 50% of sites are supported.
So, how is it possible that there is no better alternative for Chrome? A good recovery would be save probably millions or billions of hours of time globally per year.
Is there some problem in Chrome that makes it really difficult to create a working form recovery extension?
This is a group for discussing the development of extensions.
Nevermind. That should work. How interested are you in this? Is it worth my time to comment and debug the code?
On Friday, March 20, 2015 at 1:38:26 PM UTC-7, Jim Hoyle wrote:
. This includes the database overhead so the actual number of characters is less. The database would have to store the URL of the page, the ID of the field, and the text content of that field. Fields that have no ID
cannot be stored. Ideally, the database would be saved each time a field's value is changed, but this may impact performance. Also, storage is done asynchronously so no guarantees on how quickly it is done. A browser crash or power outage would almost certainly corrupt the database, so some sort of backup mechanism should be employed.Chrome extensions can only store 102,400 bytes in the cloud and 5,242,880 bytes locally
Hm, you can locally store much more than that. It depends on your storage method, there are a lot of those, unfortunately. Also, there is an "unlimitedStorage" permission that grants you more than that (not for localStorage, I believe, but for other ways).☆PhistucK
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At some point, I would require beta testers to help debug the extension. Would anyone here be willing to help?
getElementsByTagName()
would be the way to go. I'm assuming (though I don't see it in the documentation) that the live HTMLCollection would always be created in the same order each time the page is loaded. If it is, then the ordinal number of the element could be used instead of the ID.
Lazarus was owned by the business I worked for. When I left I gave full ownership of Lazarus to the other partner and agreed that I would to not make a competing product. I had hoped that the other partner would have maintained the addons but he's had other hardships which have resulted in the addon never being updated since I left. I'm really disappointed that it has been left to die a slow death, but I understand why this has occurred.
Anyhow, enough history. Whilst I cannot build a replacement for it, I can certainly help you out with info about how we solved various problems. And some of the other issues that you'll face when building this. So here's some questions for you.
1 - decide very early on if you're going to save just individual textareas (easy) or whole forms (significantly more difficult).
2 - are you going to encrypt the data? If yes, that makes it a lot better privacy-wise, but it also makes the database a lot harder to search.
3 - if you choose not to encrypt the data, then you'll have to make sure you don't save sensitive information like credit card details and passwords and such.
Some things to note:
1 - the addon will get used by jealous people to spy on their significant others. We deliberately added the Lazarus icon to every field that was being saved so that it was significantly more difficult to use Lazarus for that purpose, but still many people asked for the feature.
2 - we used an SQLite database with unlimited space to store the data. You should have no trouble using either that or IndexDB instead.
3 - people will want all of their data saved forever. They'll want to be able to search it and export it to other programs (again, also for spying on people, or for use in court). And they'll get angry if you can't or won't do that for them.
There's heaps more I could talk about here, but it's 3am and I should probably get some sleep.
If you're serious about making this an open source program, and actually getting it to work properly, then I'm sure I can help out a bit. Contractually I can't contribute to the code, but I can help out with my knowledge.
Karl
1 - decide very early on if you're going to save just individual textareas (easy) or whole forms (significantly more difficult).
<input>
<textarea>
You can use onchange events to detect content changes inside the text boxes. It'll catch cut and pasted and other non-keyboard changes. We ended up just using a timer to check all text boxes on each page (it ended up being easier in the long run when we needed to expand it to save WYSIWYG editors)
I get what you mean by saying the creator of a tool should not be held responsible, I was just gutted when I found out how some people were using it and thought I'd do something to make that harder.
You sound like you have pretty reasonable plans in place.
If there's anything I can help with don't hesitate to contact me.
Best of luck,
Karl
1. if the data is not going to be encrypted then a solution will need to be provided for sensitive fields. Otherwise it will be relatively easy for malware to piggyback on the extension in order to steal user data.
3. I agree that saving by domain (and not URL) will be the way to go
Chuck - are you on board with open sourcing this add on?
The lower the "check interval time", the more often the database is updated. The more often the database is updated, the higher the overhead and less efficient the process is.
The "delete data over n days old" idea makes sense. Let's see what other potential uses have to say about it.
I am not an admin for the group, in fact I didn't even start the thread - I only replied to a post in it. Perhaps that is the trigger that subscribes you to the group. Maybe if you post directly within the group (by going to the Chromium-Extensions-Announce - Form recovery for Chrome (Lazarus is useless) thread that would do the trick. I know you have to be logged in to the group to post, so that may also prevent email replies from being posted automatically.On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 12:12 PM, Joy of Fishes <joy.of...@gmail.com> wrote:Hello Chuck, Thank you for your response.Keep in mind I am not a techie. Does "increase the overhead" mean reduce responsiveness - I have noticed a bit of lag but that could be any number of things. Or does it mean the size of the text table?I likely don't know enough to know what I want ;) What I think I want is save close to real time and clear everything out that is more than a couple days old.I think it did save every page, but only the pages that I had entered stuff had clickable urls. I'll check this again after surfing a bit.No idea about the forum .... I am receiving email notifications of new comments so I know something took when I tried to sign up, but my reply to all at 11:47 central generated an error message. Perhaps you can decipher this:We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (chromium-extensions) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able to post:
* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
* The owner of the group may have removed this group.
* You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post.
* This group may not be open to posting.If you are admin for the forum, there might be an option at your end to add me at the list. Otherwise, feel free to forward my message(s) -- after all, I had intended to reply to the group.JoF
~ Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 12:55 PM, Chuck Baker <cbak...@gmail.com> wrote:BTW, I'm curious why your post did not appear in the Chrome-extensions Google Group forum. I got it as a personal email. Perhaps if you subscribe and post to that thread, others may see and respond to your posts.ChuckRemember also that TIRE does not save a database entry for every page visited ... only those with input fields in which data has been entered. And the only data saved is the page URL, page title, field id and field text value.Actually, lowering the save time will increase the overhead. I set the default to 5 seconds so it would be easier to debug but will likely change it before the first stable release. Eventually, I'm thinking that a 30 second interval would probably be more efficient in the long run. A one hundred character benchmark would be a good place to start. How long does it take for the average person to type 100 characters? Whatever that number is should be what the save time is save as.TIRE uses an in-memory, low overhead database to store the data so I'm hoping the size will not grow exponentially as other databases are wont to do.Hi JoF,I have not tested this project on Firefox or Opera - only Chrome.On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 9:47 AM, Joy of Fishes <joy.of...@gmail.com> wrote:Hello Chuck,I really liked Lazarus and made use of it frequently, so I am greatly looking forward to having a good replacement for it. Thank you so much for your work on this.I am likely the non-geekiest person following your project. TIRE is sort of working on Opera Developer, not that I understand how it is supposed to work, and I can see its potential usefulness. I haven't tried it yet on Opera or Firefox.I reduced the save time to 3000, & might bump it lower yet -- or patience, grasshopper, & learn to wait until the hover over my field shows that TIRE has picked up everything I typed. But with tracking every page I visit and saving text every 3-5 seconds I suspect the saved content could become very large, so I suggest some kind of auto-delete feature for older stuff -- everything after x days, for example.BTW, I have been using the Editor History tab on the Form History Control extension for Firefox to restore text, and it does work, just not as elegantly as Lazarus did.JoF
~ Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~
On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Chuck Baker <cbak...@gmail.com> wrote:
TIRE does not need to know your email. I used a prior extension's manifest.json that requested "identity.email" permissions as a template for this extension. I will fix it.
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The TIRE extension is now available for beta testing on the Chrome Web Store. Instructions on how to use it are located on the TIRE Homepage.
What I would suggest on the TIRE homepage, would be a section with features yet to be implemented and known bugs. Should/If this extension grows beyond this group, it will help so that people don't repeat the same 3 requests/bugs over and over again.
Lazarus showed an icon in input fields for various reasons. This would help to prevent people from using TIRE as a sort of Keylogger on other peoples machine ...
Maybe I already broke it already, but I would be hoping that it picks up this very comment I'm writing right now, but that doesn't seem to be the case, but no worries, it's super early in development, I'll keep testing.
Keystroke logging is an act of tracking and recording every keystroke entry made on a computer, often without the permission or knowledge of the user. A keylogger may be either hardware- or software-based, and has its uses as a legitimate personal or professional IT monitoring tool. However, keystroke logging can also be used for criminal purposes. More commonly, keystroke logging is malicious spyware that is used to capture sensitive information, like passwords or financial information, which is then sent to third parties for criminal exploitation.
Unfortunately I can't register on the forum - it won't let me use my absolutely correct Gmail, see here:I tried using a generated email address (By Blur) but it wouldn't accept that either.
The main advantage that Lazarus has over Tire is that Lazarus could save multiple different compositions for a given domain/url.
...
One way to do this is to do this like Lazarus did with a drop down box with a line for each one (as shown above in Jim Hoyle's post blah blah).
If you're serious about making this an open source program, and actually getting it to work properly, then I'm sure I can help out a bit. Contractually I can't contribute to the code, but I can help out with my knowledge.Karl
Has there been any resolution to this? I almost really miss Lazarus!!!--
On Monday, March 30, 2015 at 4:14:54 PM UTC+8, Jim Hoyle wrote:I have to say once again that I'm pretty sure this would be one of the most useful Chrome extensions ever.Saving: always and frequently save every possible input field. Especially forum posts, company forms (for contacting, sending some applications and whatnot), but also short input fields like phone number. Then main use is to recover your long writings, without having to remember to save. Is there a problem with accumulating too much data? What are the max data limits? I don't care whether there is a risk of storing confidential information - you can just disable the whole plugin if you want to be safe. Of course the best is if there is a good interface where you can disable certain input fields and sites and where you can delete parts of history. But definitely the most important thing is to save everything, even in a total mess of input history, as long as you actually can retrieve your writing.This is the Lazarus approach: http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/3334000/3334947/lazarus-form-recovery-chrome-03-700x178.jpgAnd this is Firefox Textarea Cache approach: http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/save-text-comments.png and http://cnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2011/12/12/5742e1ff-fdc4-11e2-8c7c-d4ae52e62bcc/a92e4bdddf9e5aa7ad5c19dc09d47c89/12_13_11TextareaCache6.pngFor recovering, the best is to press right button inside the field and then you have the options to get your history for the field. The Lazarus icon is on the way often and it's not necessary. The best is if you can rest assured that every time you press the right button you will see your history there, maybe 5 last posts for the field like so:"Bla bla bla... : 3:33 PM 2015-03-01""Blu blu blu... : 4:44 PM 2015-03-05""Blo blo blo... : 1:11 PM 2015-03-11""Ble ble ble... : 12:22 PM 2015-03-13""Bli bli bli... : 7:25 PM 2015-03-31"And then you could look at your whole history too, that'd be nice. Depends how the synced storage works and what limitations it has?On Monday, March 30, 2015 at 5:09:17 AM UTC+3, Daniel F wrote:There are multiple different options.For saving:1: Click a button by the field to save2: Click an extension to save3: Save text with a length greater than something4: Always save5: Some combinationOnce you set it to save, it could automatically do so in the futureFor recovering:1: Click a button by the field to recover2: Click an extension to recover3: Always recover4: Some combinationAlways for both can be annoying because it will remember everything, even search terms.Which would you people prefer?
On Sunday, March 29, 2015 at 7:05:11 PM UTC-7, Daniel F wrote:Yes, I have experienced that problem. I don't know why that page doesn't work. I hastily coded that extension, because I never felt a need for it, so I didn't know if it would be actually used. If you people are interested, I will put more work into it.
On Friday, March 20, 2015 at 1:38:26 PM UTC-7, Jim Hoyle wrote:I find it incredible that there is no proper way to recover your lost form input in Google Chrome. As many know, Textarea Cache on Firefox has much wider form support than Lazarus.
Lazarus has been very quirky from day one. Lazarus 3.0.6 is currently the official version in Chrome Web Store, but you might be able to also download 3.2 beta from http://getlazarus.com/download and then drag it to Chrome Extensions ( chrome://extensions/ ). However, 3.2 doesn't seem to work any better than 3.0.6 so maybe only 50% of sites are supported.
So, how is it possible that there is no better alternative for Chrome? A good recovery would be save probably millions or billions of hours of time globally per year.
Is there some problem in Chrome that makes it really difficult to create a working form recovery extension?
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Hello fellow developers. Am I the only one who feels like all possible good chrome extensions have already been made at this point? Or am I just not creative?
On 22 February 2017 at 10:22, Ory Zaidenvorm <ory...@gmail.com> wrote:
Chuck,What's your preferred way for us to contribute? Fork + Pull Request? or add us as Contributors?Also is there somewhere a list of tasks left to do (so we can pick one up and chip at it)?CheersOry
On Tuesday, 21 February 2017 07:48:49 UTC+11, Chuck Baker wrote:Hi Garrett,
Are you a developer? If so, I would appreciate help coding this extension. My time has been limited and I probably won't be able to get back into it until this summer. In the meantime, I've made the extension open source and have hosted it on GitHub (https://github.com/Shadoefax/TIRE-for-Chrome). The bulk has been coded and it works fairly well as is, but there is defiantly room for improvement.
On Monday, February 20, 2017 at 11:22:33 AM UTC-7, Garrett wrote:If this is still on going, yes, I'd love to help test this out also.
On Friday, March 20, 2015 at 3:38:26 PM UTC-5, Jim Hoyle wrote:I find it incredible that there is no proper way to recover your lost form input in Google Chrome. As many know, Textarea Cache on Firefox has much wider form support than Lazarus.
Lazarus has been very quirky from day one. Lazarus 3.0.6 is currently the official version in Chrome Web Store, but you might be able to also download 3.2 beta from http://getlazarus.com/download and then drag it to Chrome Extensions ( chrome://extensions/ ). However, 3.2 doesn't seem to work any better than 3.0.6 so maybe only 50% of sites are supported.
So, how is it possible that there is no better alternative for Chrome? A good recovery would be save probably millions or billions of hours of time globally per year.
Is there some problem in Chrome that makes it really difficult to create a working form recovery extension?
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It seems there was a little hiccup during the publishing on the webstore. Version 1.0.2 was active for about an hour or so, but the current version is 1.0.3. If you have v1.0.2 installed, please update it.
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I find it incredible that there is no proper way to recover your lost form input in Google Chrome. As many know, Textarea Cache on Firefox has much wider form support than Lazarus.
Since it has been over a year since any progress has been made, I guess we can assume that the new project has been abandoned. I think I'll have a go at it.
I've been developing Firefox extensions for over a decade and am not new to the process. However, all the Fx extensions I've developed were with the soon-to-be deprecated XUL/XPCOM framework in favor of WebExtensions. I've already written three or four Chrome extensions with WebExtensions and have found it severely limiting compared to XPCOM. Nonetheless, I was able to re-write one of my extensions (Paste Email Plus) to work with Chrome (Paste Email Plus for Chrome). That extension has some similarities to what is being discussed here. Paste Email Plus parses the DOM for all input fields and allows users to paste a predefined text string from a dropdown list. A form fill recovery extension would also have to parse the DOM for input fields, but would save the field's value in a nonvolatile database.
One potential problem would be the limitations WebExtensions sets on storage. Chrome extensions can only store 102,400 bytes in the cloud and 5,242,880 bytes locally. This includes the database overhead so the actual number of characters is less. The database would have to store the URL of the page, the ID of the field, and the text content of that field. Fields that have no ID
cannot be stored. Ideally, the database would be saved each time a field's value is changed, but this may impact performance. Also, storage is done asynchronously so no guarantees on how quickly it is done. A browser crash or power outage would almost certainly corrupt the database, so some sort of backup mechanism should be employed.
At some point, I would require beta testers to help debug the extension. Would anyone here be willing to help?